New york city.
[woman] happy new year!
At the dawn of the 80s, it was exploding with opportunity.
[newsreader] boom times, that's what the numbers signal today,
An economy that's on a roll in this country.
A place to seek money, power, fame.
Amid the glitz and greed, five titans seized their moment.
By the mid 80s, they'd figured out that to get what they wanted,
They just had to go to the media.
And the media was more than happy to oblige.
A wall street magician was basking in the spotlight.
[ivan boesky] I predict that this is just the beginning.
Even as his crimes grew more and more brazen.
[james b stewart] this was gonna come crashing down on him.
A real estate mogul was waist-deep in red ink.
[natalie byfield] trump was particularly good at playing the media.
Even as he convinced the world it was just the opposite.
Oh donald, oh donald, you are a big deal.
[emily fox] it is the greatest charade that donald trump ever pulled off.
The hotel queen was winning over the public.
[leona helmsley] look at the shape of the head,
You can see the brain just sits there. I'm very serious.
But behind her castle walls, she was nothing but wicked.
And as a publicity-hungry prosecutor plotted his next heroic act for the papers...
I mean, it was crazy. Us attorneys aren't supposed to do that kind of stuff.
A newly christened mob boss mocked him in those very same pages.
[newsreader] outfoxing the foxes in a big stakes game of cops and robbers
That has made gotti kind of a legend.
[george gabriel] the downside to the real mobsters is,
Who needs this attention?
We're a secret organization.
[bryan burrough] even for a crook, he was a smart guy.
But he made the mistake of dealing with people who weren't.
[bill dowling] she would lash out at you and I saw it happen to a number of people.
[tony schwartz] was the story that I told completely, ultimately false? Yes.
These five titans would reshape the city and the world we live in today.
By the mid 80s, they'd mastered the art of fame.
But soon they'd learn that exposure can burn.
[newsreader] when new yorkers pick up their tabloids,
The daily news and the post each morning, they expect the headlines to pack a wallop.
And they do.
For died-in-the-wool new yorkers,
There's nothing quite like a good juicy scandal
And in the mid 80s, the press served up one after another.
[jonathan mahler] crime, money, power, what was happening in this country
Created the sort of perfect for tabloid journalism and for this kind of moment.
[fox] every day it was just a back and forth
Between the daily news and the new york post
And it helped the new york tabloids have constant fodder,
Which they desperately needed every day.
[michael musto] the 80s is when the tabloids really started battling it out.
And the people that emerged certainly had a knack for working the media.
[byfield] there was a lot of attention in the media
To business and the captains of industry.
They became celebrities.
[glenn plaskin] this was better than dynasty.
[blake carrington] damn you alexis, I'm gonna kill you.
Don't!
[glenn plaskin] this was real life dynasty.
[charles bagli] at this point, developers had almost supplanted movie stars in the gossip column
Everything they did was so amusing, so wonderful.
[david cay johnston] and one of the biggest people
Who's benefited from this is donald trump.
He came, he saw, he conquered. And as the decade pressed on,
The young developer from the outer boroughs was only growing bolder.
[johnston] he had built trump tower, which made a tremendous amount of money.
He had two casinos that were throwing cash at him like crazy.
[michael kruse] but he also wants more. More, more, more.
He was determined to see his name splashed across the sky line.
But first, he'd need his name splashed across the headlines.
The fact that new york was the media capital of the world allowed him
To create the persona, to create the celebrity, create the name donald trump.
The whole ethos of donald trump's life has been,
"look at me, how rich I am, look how successful I am."
It's this mythology that has been built up.
[newsreader] you cannot walk far in manhattan these days
Without seeing a piece of real estate bearing the trump name.
It looked like a hugely successful operation.
It was important to maintain that image because image was reality.
[newsreader] donald trump has become
One of america's best known and most successful builders.
[newsreader] turning a $40 million real estate business
Into a billion dollar empire.
[letterman] ...Has enough money to give everyone in the audience tonight a million dollars.
[applause]
[newsreader] ok. Ok, we'll see what kind of mood he's in.
[laughter and applause]
[johnston] at the time, bankers were doing many more loans based on reputation
And so when donald gets magazine covers and tv shows about how rich he is
And featuring his helicopter, bankers feel some sense of confidence in him.
That's why he really wanted to be on the forbes 400 list.
[sue carswell] back in the 1980s this john barron guy was one of his publicists.
He was the go to guy to get, you know, trump goods.
[carswell] and he would say, "well, you know,
"I'm just calling for donald and I need to tell you this story."
But they were always him. It was donald trump.
It's not like he has a subtle voice.
Donald trump as john barron, it's just donald trump.
[barbara res] john barron is trump's alter ego, I guess, I don't know. It was his alias.
He was doing the press, he was doing the pr. He was making the phone calls.
[ken auletta] he just concocted this whole false reality.
So he goes to forbes and tells them, "I have all this money."
And forbes puts him on this list.
[res] I mean, trump was lying so that he could move himself up on the forbes 400,
You know, talking about his wealth.
Wealthy people don't do that, they keep that to themselves.
[tony schwartz] his life underneath that persona and sheen
Was arguably falling apart economically.
He was over extended on a lot of his loans, both in atlantic city and in new york.
At the same time he was buying all the accouterments of the wealthy.
The plane, the football team. His second casino hotel, the castle.
Actually he had lost a staggering amount of money,
A billion dollars in ten years,
More than any other individual in the united states.
One of the most amazing things about all of this was he's also writing and publishing
The art of the deal while he is losing money on every deal that he was making.
Donald just talk for a minute, if you would, about the art of the deal
And your business philosophy.
[donald trump] okay. You've either got it or you don't.
The book the art of the deal was the first thing that gave donald trump
A sort of national audience and it sold millions of copies.
It was actually written by tony schwartz.
Trump was not involved for even a minute in any aspect of writing the book.
I wrote the book and miraculously, he read the book.
How you doing?
From the very first interview that I did with him for the book,
It was clear that there was almost a complete inability
To sit still and answer questions
For more than a few minutes at a time.
Because I couldn't get from trump detail on the deals he was doing,
I would ultimately go to other players in those deals and try to flesh it out.
What I would discover is that their version of what happened in the deals
Was quite different than his version.
And his version was always the most self aggrandizing version
And it was often an inaccurate version.
So was the story that I told completely, ultimately false?
Yes. It was.
It was an invented story, invented at a level far beyond what I recognized even
At the time, but it was never anything close to the reality of who he was.
People who read the book uncritically come away thinking, "what a genius he is."
It really put donald on the map.
[kathleen] trump is taking on new meaning. Tycoon, billionaire, maverick.
It's written all over new york and atlantic city and now it's on the cover of a book.
How important is your word and your handshake in a deal? Or does everything have to be--
Very important.
What? How does it make the difference?
Handshake and deals are just to me very important, kathleen.
This was a man who is portraying his great wealth,
His enormous success, his growing businesses,
But the reality was is that he was losing more money
Than I think any american was at that time.
What do you think people are gonna get out of it, if they read it?
I mean, what can someone at home on a $30,000--
It's really a study of life, kathleen. How do to it and how to really make life.
How to make life.
How to make life. How to be with life and how to live with life.
It is the greatest charade that donald trump ever pulled off.
This is a time period where we're celebrating money,
And who could make the most of it.
And the media was very complicit in exposing how brilliant and great
And wonderful these people were, it didn't have to be true.
And that is on us.
[michael kruse] for donald trump some of that started to go to his head
And he considered himself utterly invincible.
He was going to do exactly what he wanted for as long as he could get away with it.
[mahler] there had always been a culture of money in new york.
There had always been rich people in new york
But there had never been a donald trump before.
There had always been luxury hotels in new york
But there had never been a helmsley palace.
And there had always been gangsters in new york.
But there had never been a john gotti,
A guy who was in the tabloids all the time and seemingly loved it.
He was the capo who wanted to be don.
And he decided he wouldn't wait for his due, he'd seize it.
[newsreader] you are looking at the body of paul castellano,
The boss of all bosses of american organized crime.
[newsreader] paul castellano, a man authorities say
Was the most horrible mafia boss in the nation,
Was shot and killed in front of a new york city restaurant tonight.
[mahler] within hours everybody knew that gotti was responsible.
We understood what was going on through fbi informants.
[george gabriel] killing the boss is like the cardinal rule.
You can't do that. You don't do that.
[michel chertoff] it was a very bold attack.
[newsreader] authorities believe the brutal process of succession is already underway.
[gabriel] gotti called a meeting of all the captains.
And they say, "all right, we're not sure what happened to paul. He's dead."
But we're here tonight to pick another boss.
[bruce mouw] everyone in the room knew who did it.
But they had to play along with this farce.
Frank decicco stands up.
He says, "I nominate john gotti to become boss of the gambino family."
[gabriel] the captains that he conspired with were walking around them all,
Basically they were there armed and if anybody was gonna oppose it,
That was gonna be a problem.
Everybody in the room, okay, we're good. The family's intact.
Everybody leaves happy.
[newsreader] john gotti allegedly runs an enterprise
As powerful as many giant corporations.
[sean deveney] once he got to power, gotti now wanted to be the peacock.
Because he'd spent so long feeling underappreciated within the gambino family,
When he gets to the top of it, it almost wants to make up for lost time.
[ed mcdonald] he became much more noticeable. He craved the attention he was getting.
[gabriel] all of a sudden he starts wearing the $2000 suits and the handmade ties.
And he's going out to the finest restaurants, clubs.
He's attracting page six attention.
He's living the life.
[newsreader] gotti has become quickly recognizable,
If only for his custom-made suits and his frequent stops at the stylarama hair salon.
[vito bollettieri] he's got very good taste. He likes his hair extremely perfect.
This is against everything that the mafia has ever done
And the way it's conducted business.
There's a term in italian called omerta , which basically means "silence."
If you're a boss you don't want anybody to know you're a boss.
And that's why generations of mafia heads before him hadn't acted that way.
He is handsome, he does wear $2000 suits. He is well groomed.
Every hair is always in place. He's quick with one liners.
[mcdonald] john gotti was loved by the tabloids.
And by the television stations, they just couldn't get enough of him.
I mean, he was good copy. And john gotti fed into this.
People just, people loved watching him, loved seeing this whole spectacle unfold.
We have here john gotti's top ten tax tips. John gotti's top ten tax tips.
I've met him, I think he's a wonderful man. I think he's probably largely misunderstood.
[laughter]
Quite frankly there were a lot of people, you know, they just dismissed
How bad of a guy he was. And that was the knack that he had.
Number nine: Guys who escape from the trunk of your car may be considered business losses.
[laughter]
And number eight: No matter how much he relies on your business,
A funeral director does not count as a dependent.
[laughter]
But he was a killer. I mean, this was not a tv show.
Under his leadership, as with all the bosses, you know,
People who got in the way wound up getting hurt.
He was ruthless.
Gotti's executed someone because he didn't show up when gotti summoned him.
And he severed his head off.
James mcbratney, robert dibernardo, tommy spinelli, big gus sclafani
Gotti was just a blood thirsty, violent criminal.
As the gambino family head,
It has become a much more violent, violent institution than it was previously
Because gotti, that's his outlook,
Is if I can't get my way, I'm just gonna kill you.
He was the jekyll and hyde if you will, right,
The guy that the public got to see and what they didn't see
Was the ruthless guy behind those closed doors
Who's ordering hits, taking over business,
Who's doing whatever he wants in a very strong way.
Downside to the real mobsters is who needs this attention?
This isn't what we do. We're a secret organization. But for john, it worked.
If you're going to be that public, it makes him a target to law enforcement.
And this was a guy who was not careful, this was a guy who was violent
And this was a guy who was basically doomed
To take the mafia and see it implode on itself.
In the mid 80s, new york was booming
And the biggest winners were putting on the greatest show on earth.
And yet they faced increasingly stiff competition
Because a revolution in television was about to change everything.
I want my mtv.
[announcer] mtv music television
It was the ultimate springboard for fame.
Transforming local celebrities from new york's music scene into television superstars.
We've gotta look at the ramones and their triumphant return
To their original starting place right here in new york city.
[kurt andersen] mtv did express a certain kind of new york inflected cool.
And the density of club culture and street culture and graffiti as art adding to the sense of,
"look at all this innovative, stylish stuff that is happening in the city."
And in the same way that a lot of new york city and the kind of cultural excitement
Was uptown meets downtown, mtv kind of expressed that.
[michael musto] and it was exciting. I watched it day and night.
And to be a music star at this point, you couldn't just be a good singer.
You had to have a personality.
You had to be a self made cyndi lauper. It was perfect for the 80s.
[lizzy goodman] there was brilliant art being made in the form of music videos
By all of the artists that became the biggest pop stars of this age.
Madonna, who had come from this underground club world in new york,
Understood a visual medium in a way that artists before her had not.
And mtv had this role of populating a stage
That was, all of a sudden, enormous
With like, really weird, beautiful, odd pop art.
[darryl mcdaniels] in the 80s, mtv was able to put hip hop into living rooms
Not only across the nation, across the globe.
[michael holman] from hip hop's humble beginnings,
With the reach and the power of mtv,
You have artists like run-dmc appearing on them and just changing everything.
You know, with "walk this way" or "my adidas."
[run-dmc rapping]
They knew to take adidas shoes and make a song out of it and it becomes a hit record
And kids go to the concert holding their adidas shoes up in the air.
Run-dmc exploded, we was the first to do everything.
First to go gold, first to go platinum, first on the cover of rolling stone .
First on mtv, which was huge here in new york city.
[holman] they become international sensations. And the world comes to them.
The world comes to hip hop. That's how big it is. That's how important it is.
It was a brave new world and whether you were a rock star or a titan of industry,
Talent alone was no longer enough.
It was about selling an image, and image was everything.
The 80s redefined what success meant.
You could be a self-made millionaire if you radiated something.
[tina brown] they were colorful, they were rich. They were calling out to be covered.
You know, this was the beginning of making ceos celebrities, which they really weren't before
Before they were just boring people
Who sat behind desks that you didn't wanna write about.
Now all of a sudden they're posing with manhattan skylines behind them,
Thrusting themselves over the desk.
It then became not enough to be in the fortune 500.
I mean, you wanted to be the face of your company.
The ultimate example of that was, of course, leona helmsley.
Whether you knew her as the queen of mean or the queen of the palace,
She was a woman reigning supreme in a man's world.
And with the limelight firmly fixed on her, she'd never let you forget it.
Am I comfortable? I make a living.
[woman] leona helmsley was her own brilliant public relations person.
[newsreader] leona helmsley, the emblem of the helmsley hotel empire.
[newsreader 2] leona helmsley, the hotel queen billionaire.
[glenn plaskin] nobody had ever taken their name and their face
And turned it into such a personal brand, much less in real estate.
Trump would follow in her footsteps, in a sense,
Because he would start putting his name
On trump tower, trump palace, trump park, trump everything.
And so she had just the right face, name, and personality.
The pillows were gonna be perfect. The rooms were gonna be impeccably clean.
The flowers, the carpet, everything was gonna be perfect.
[elaine silverstein] this wealthy, regal woman was going to be attending
To the details in the hotel and people believed it.
[elaine taylor-gordon] what could be more fabulous than being treated like royalty.
But while her guests may have reveled in her attention, others were left frozen in fear.
[bill dowling] she had an incredibly good sense of how to build a bond
With the customers of the hotel chain. But everyone was scared of leona.
She would lash out at you and I saw it happen to a number of people
Who had worked with her for years.
At the restaurant of the helmsley palace,
If there was as speck of dust on a glass or a saucer,
She would call the waiter over, she would fire him and smash the saucer on the floor.
If service was slow or if the soup was cold, she would just go nuts.
"now you're fired, goodbye."
Just like the queen of hearts in alice in wonderland.
Off with their head!
Off with your head.
Leona was a petty tyrant, really.
[dowling] leona helmsley was the most vain person I've ever known
And this queen stands guard campaign fed into that like pouring gasoline on a flame.
She was addicted to fame. She was no longer the immigrant girl,
Scrambling up the ladder.
She wanted to step out there in the gorgeous gown
And have the klieg lights and be on harry's arm.
It wasn't long after that that leona and harry bought dunnellen.
This place fed into her queendom [laughs] when she bought it.
[musto] they moved to greenwich, connecticut.
But they don't just buy a house in greenwich, connecticut.
They buy an estate, dunnellen hall.
Dunnellen has 28 rooms, it's on 26 acres of land,
It's 21,000 square feet of living space.
[plaskin]it was like a big english country home
And it all opened out into this beautiful back lawn.
[leona helmsley] I have sheep. One is bo, one is peep.
Here bo. It's your mother.
They are dumb.
They walked the grounds with mike wallis. They talked about their second pool.
[mike wallis] and up top?
[harry helmsley] on top we're gonna have, of course, a dance floor.
[singing] dance in an old fashioned way.
It's none of my business, but, how much?
And she would say, "I don't know."
I don't know.
Dunnellen was very grand. And she expected to be treated like a queen.
[dowling] she wanted to be the real queen
But there was no similarity between what she was like in real life
And what the image was that she portrayed. And that always catches up with people.
She believed that her standards were justified at dunnellen.
To her they weren't indulgences, they were necessities.
So this is the world she created for herself. And this would be the world of her downfall.
Plus [laughs] the park lane, tplus the carlton house,g? ,
Plus the saint moritz plus the harley hotel. Plus, plus, plus, plus.
Oh you get it.
[burrough] there was an acceptance in the 80s
Of, "ya make it, you know, when you show it."
Bling. I mean, that was kind of a new thing.
[dowling] greed will always be with us, it doesn't disappear.
[maddrick] but by the mid 80s, the case against greed,
The cultural restraint is no longer there.
[newsreader] a new thinking gripped wall street, a new attitude.
Get yours while the getting is good.
[gil troy] the gospel of wealth of new york in the 1980s is that if you make money,
Make sure to make more and more and more. 'cause that's your path to virtue.
And ivan boesky was one of the great symbols of wall street greed in the 1980s.
By 1985, the king of arbitrage was the biggest earner on wall street.
But what he wanted even more was fame.
To achieve it, he'd need to keep his crimes hidden while keeping himself front and center,
A balancing act he could only manage for so long.
Our guest tonight, ivan boesky, wall street's biggest independent speculator.
The big boys in the business world, which sparked words like "corporate takeover."
What's behind all of the activity now? What's it mean to us?
Well, a man who knows a lot about it is ivan boesky. He's one of the big boys.
[sorkin] he became emblematic of what wall street was in the 1980s,
He was the trader who had this impossible success.
This is the horatio alger story, but just with a lot of zeros and commas.
He was driven in a stretch limo and he was regal looking, but crude.
[james b stewart] he always wanted to call attention to the fact
That he made a lot of money.
For example, he invited a group of people, including potential clients
To a dinner at a very expensive restaurant.
Boesky, in front of all these people, he said he'd order everything on the menu.
[harvey pitt] everything on the menu.
I mean, eating out with ivan was an adventure.
[stewart] I will then taste everything on the menu and then decide what I want.
He was...
...Odd. And he used that to his advantage. It was part of his mystique.
By now, boesky had been the subject of fawning profiles.
He was getting constant speaking invitations.
It was both a sign of his own popularity but also the values of the time.
There were wealthy people that you saw
Both on the wall street journal and in people magazine.
This was entirely new. Business became part of his zeitgeist.
In america, one of the great things about this nation
Is that we can seek profit. And I'm proud of that.
[newsreader] boesky is pushing a book he's written called merger mania .
[stewart] he became so famous, he wrote a book, it was a best seller.
Now, his book purported to explain how he did this.
We now know, of course, that merger mania was just part of the cover story.
Nothing in merger mania had anything to do with his actual investment decisions.
The information that was vital to him was confidential inside information.
It was illegal to be disseminating.
[bethany mclean] he's getting inside information from a variety of sources,
Including marty siegel and he's using that to bet on deals and in pretty blatant ways
Boesky and an investment banker named marty siegel were passing cash for information,
Getting that information was steeling form shareholders.
Maybe they tried to convince themselves it wasn't but that was pure rationalization.
[mclean] and so, you could look at that book and say,
"he's got this mammoth ego that now needs to be fed,"
Or you can see it as him trying to whitewash what he was doing
By putting this public narrative out there that's very different than what was,
What was actually happening.
But there's really, I guess, at this point, no number that's enough.
It was incredibly risky for boesky to be out bragging
And calling attention to his success.
Which was only gonna lead to more scrutiny and questions
But he couldn't resist the allure of publicity.
What do you think the role of inside information is in the market today?
I have no way of touching that. I think it's is a troubling matter
To the interest of those of us in the industry
That all such kinds of behaviors be eliminated isn't possible.
People who are committing crimes often can't resist tipping their hat
And showing that there might be something going on.
Would it be inside information if investors such as yourself
Found it to your benefit to start a rumor?
You have to understand that I'm a professional and one doesn't have the time
To even concern himself with something as kind of childish as that.
And that's usually the natural course of events.
It takes a very special kind of fraudster to keep reining it in.
[stewart] as boesky is doing all of this publicity,
He secretly builds a network of people
Who were funneling inside information to him
In return for rewards of one kind of another.
And they were all enriching themselves illegally.
You could argue that people always get careless as their fraud goes on longer.
They get greedier and they get more reckless.
It's almost akin to eating potato chips.
The more potato chips you eat, the more you want.
Ivan was a smart guy. Even for a crook he was a smart guy.
But he made the mistake of dealing with people who weren't.
Dennis levine would be exhibit a.
[denis levine] I live for the high of making those trades, of doing the next deal.
Dennis levine was a schmuck.
Everybody knew a dennis levine.
A schmucky kid who came here and cut corners to be somebody. He was such a putz.
Dennis levine stumbled into the world of mergers and acquisitions.
He was hired by drexel burnham lambert
And trumpeted as their new investment banking star who'd be based in new york
To compliment the milken operation on the west coast.
Drexel has changed the face of american finance
And this one man did it almost single handedly.
It was really drexel, burnham, and particularly michael milken,
Who used junk bonds to fuel the takeover booms, to finance corporate raiders.
To shake up corporate america in a way that it had never confronted before.
Drexel burnham lambert was the center of the information flow.
[newsreader] dennis levine impressed colleagues as being very well wired
To the other investment banking firms and to wall street's rumor mills
Dennis levine had no recognizable banking skills other than his ability to,
As they used to call it, work the phones.
He had an extra long cord so he could wander around the office
While holding the phone and talking at the same time.
And so it was very, very lucrative for him.
It was like a cash register going off.
[burrough] everybody knew a dennis levine.
The guy at the next desk that you didn't like that talked too loud
About his new summer house or his new boat.
That was dennis levine and he was the template for the sordid young new yorker
Who would do anything to be anything.
[stewart ]boesky was a dream for somebody like levine.
So it was naturally someone that levine would want to cultivate a relationship with.
And a little bit like boesky, he managed to put together a ring of people
Who fed him inside information.
It was very valuable for both levine and boesky to have a network of sources
So that these tips never came from one identifiable source.
They had a very symbiotic relationship.
And they hammered out a very specific profit-sharing agreement.
If levine was the source of a investment by boesky,
He got 5% of the profits.
If he only gave him additional information about something
That boesky had already invested in, he got 1% of the profits.
They both knew what was going on. They were playing the game.
They were both blatantly violating the law.
What ivan boesky did was white line crime.
There ain't no doubt that this was a crime
And they stupidly thought they could not get caught.
Dennis levine was cataclysmic for boesky. This was gonna come crashing down on him.
There is no quick fix fwith no end in sight.. Anc
How available is it? Well, today three public officials took to the streets to find out.
Ellen fleysher watched the results.
[ellen fleysher] you could call it a mixed metaphor,
The pinstriped trousers worn by the us attorney topped by a leather hells angels vest.
The vest supplied by the drug enforcement administration
As rudolph giuliani, and senator alfonse d'amato,
And benjamin baird, chairman of the us parole commission,
Went shopping for crack in washington heights.
I mean, it was crazy. I mean, giuliani dressed as a hells angel.
Us attorney's aren't supposed to do that kind of stuff.
For a hard driving prosecutor in the dawn of his career, the rules were simple.
Be bold, be unapologetic, and keep everyone watching by any means necessary.
[rudolph giuliani] people are not getting adequate sentences
To really deter this kind of activity, this is a terrible, terrible emergency.
I mean, it just showed how kind of singular giuliani was,
As kind of part law man, part tabloid figure.
[michael winerip] what he lacked in natural charm, he sort of made up for in chutzpah.
He took on the entire mob leadership.
There was nothing about giuliani that was not extraordinarily ambitious.
The commission case goes to trial and rudy wins, much to his credit.
He delivered on his promise, which is rare in life.
[newsreader] at the age of 40, he is described by friend and foe alike
As hard working, dynamic, good at what he does,
And to that list his detractors add: Publicity hound.
[troy] rudy giuliani in the 1980s really is our superhero.
But he doesn't do it in traditional american ways, silently.
He does it in front of the camera.
He does it with lights and camera and action and microphone.
[newsreader] we have come to know the face of rudolph giuliani,
A steady presence in the morning papers and evening news.
More than any other us attorney for the southern district of new york,
Giuliani has sown himself into the fabric of this city.
[winerip] he talked about it in almost a philosophical way,
That I wanna publicize the great work of our office. But that's not what was driving him.
What was driving him was what rudy was doing and his relentless climb.
It's rumored a lot that you've got political ambitions.
Right. I hear it all the time. [laughs]
Right. [laughs] so is true?
No, it's not true. I mean...
The reason I have difficult in completely eliminating
All speculation about it is that I will not say I will never in my entire life
Run for public office because I don't know the answer to that.
[mcdonald] I don't think there's any question that rudy giuliani used his office
To generate publicity for himself so that he could run for mayor, run for president,
Become the lawyer for the president of the united states. [laughs]
He would make a name for himself prosecuting organized crime.
Make a name for himself in prosecuting some public corruption
In the city of new york.
After that he went to wall street.
[randy mastro] back in the 80s there was insider trading.
Back in the 80s there were junk bonds.
Back in the 80s there were some offenses on wall street
That cried out for a prosecution. Yet, prosecutions of wall street
And white collar crime had not been common prior to this time.
[kirtzman] you have to remember that these wall street titans,
They were kind of heroes to many americans.
They embodied american success and ingenuity and I don't think giuliani saw that at all.
I mean, he found the excess repugnant
And he also saw that as another vehicle towards fame.
[andrew ross sorkin] this was his moment to make his name
As the lead prosecutor in new york
And he saw this as an opportunity
Not just to find justice, but I think, in some ways,
To find justice for himself, which was power.
What started as a surge of opportunity had transformed into a zeitgeist
Fueled by money, power and fame.
Tycoons, pop icons, and desperados alike were celebrated
By a fawning public regardless of how they achieved their fortunes.
Americans had bought into a new image of success, hook, line, and sinker.
And fantasized about living that way too, some day.
[announcer] it's another dazzling lifestyles of the rich and famous .
Meet the stars of show business and big business.
Discover how life's winner live, love, and spend their fortunes.
Look. America has always been a country of income inequality.
But in previous generations, those of great wealth had the taste
To hide away and not display themselves.
The 80s really was one of the first times where a lot of the nouveau riche
Felt comfortable displaying that wealth. It was sordid. It was seamy.
Unless, of course, you wanted to do it yourself.
Now they're living in new york
Where it's so clear who are the masters of the universe but to make it even worse,
To make it even more shakespearean, ivan boesky goes to berkeley.
He gives a commencement address. And he says, "greed can be healthy."
[boesky] I urge you, as a part of your ambitions, seek wealth.
[cheering and applause]
And he gave this speech that essentially said, "greed is good."
And of course the speech is enshrined in the movie wall street by michael douglas.
Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.
Greed is right. Greed works.
Does anyone disagree with that? No.
To someone of my generation who knew of berkeley as a hot bed of, you know,
Left wing student unrest, it was fascinating that students at berkeley
Voted to have ivan boesky be their commencement speaker.
And that... It was the one line in the entire speech that drew spontaneous applause.
But do it in a virtuous and honest way.
[burrough] there was a new generation
That desperately needed to hear that this was ok.
They were doing things that their mothers and fathers hadn't done.
Maybe their mothers and fathers had been working on the line at gm or campbell soup
And here they were making nothing,
Just making millions of dollars trading stocks and bonds.
It's all right.
[laughter and cheering]
And to have someone like boesky say,
"it's ok, you're doing good. You're pursuing a full life."
You know, I think there is a generation that really wanted to hear that message.
Fame. Fortune. Adoration.
For an insecure outsider who'd conned his way to the top,
It was everything he'd always wanted.
But he was flying too close to the sun.
This has got a dark side because it ain't possible to dial it back.
Exposure can burn.
[newsreader] dennis levine, a young investment banker,
Was arrested and charged with insider trading.
[newsreader] investment banker dennis levine collected $12.5 million in illegal profits
[dennis levine] I realize I've committed very serious crimes, for which I'm very sorry
[newsreader] levine has pleaded guilty and will turn over almost all of his estimated wealth.
The man responsible for that arrest is rudolph giuliani,
Us attorney for the southern district of new york.
Well, he allegedly obtained information about mergers
That would take place in the future or other types of information
That would have the effect of driving up the price of the stock
And bought large blocks of that stock.
[interviewer] was anyone else involved in this at all? Knowingly?
Yes. At this point, though, I can't identify anyone else.
[journalists] mr. Boesky, any comment? Any comment, mr. Boesky?
So many things are too good to be true in retrospect, right?
If everybody's making fortunes and the champagne is flowing,
You know it's all gonna come to a crashing halt.
[dramatic music playing]